The Maids of Chateau Vernet

by Steven Landry

  Hiram searched the text for each of the names scribbled on the old photo. Jonah had passed without warning in 1939. As things started to turn sour in Europe, young Silas had been shipped off to live with relatives in America. Danette Halphen, Hiram’s great-great-grandmother, crossed France in one of the Holocaust trains headed for a camp in Upper Silesia, Poland in August of 1942. Auschwitz. Hiram stopped reading. He picked up the picture again and touched the face that resembled his sister Rachel.

  A small section beside the text highlighted Moshi’s research effort. “I spent the afternoon searching though the archived prisoner manifests for the Holocaust trains that moved the deportees from Drancy to Auschwitz. I discovered that Danette Halphen, your great-great-grandmother, spent less time at Drancy than I originally thought. After four months at Camp Joffre in Rivesaltes, she was transported via convoy to the internment camp in Drancy. She arrived at Drancy on August 13, 1942. Just fifteen days later, on August 28, 1942, she was transferred to Auschwitz on Transport 25, Train 901-20.” If his father’s research was correct, at this very moment Danette would be in a Vichy internment camp near Rivesaltes in the department of Pyrénées-Orientales, in the unoccupied French State, more commonly known as Vichy France.

  Hiram was a soldier and it would take a physicist to figure out how he had been thrown back in time, though he surmised the nuclear explosion had something to do with it. He’d first been taught the physics of temporal artifacts in high school, knowledge that had pretty much gone in one ear and out the other. Like the C2ID2, he knew how to use the pods, but didn’t really understand how they worked. He recalled a discussion about the Butterfly Effect, which postulated that even the tiniest change to the past would have tremendous effects on the future. Hiram reasoned that he had changed the future just by exiting the pod in 1942. He was one man. What kind of damage could one man really do? “Step on a butterfly,” he said aloud. A small creature wriggled in the tree above him, the threat seeming to make it nervous. “I haven’t done anything yet,” he yelled at the animal.

  He stared at the faces in the image one more time. He had to take the chance to save his great-great-grandmother. And then he would see what could be done about Vichy and the Nazis.

  4

  1320 hours, Early Afternoon, Monday, July 6, 1942, Pyrénées-Orientales Department, Vichy France

  Hiram waited in a covered and concealed foxhole on a slope overlooking a mountain road near the junction of the French, Andorran, and Spanish borders. He followed the progress of an approaching convoy via an overhead drone’s video feed to the C2ID2’s auxiliary monitor, which rested on his knees. The C2ID2 connected to his other two companions: a small wheeled recon robot watching the road a kilometer to the east of his ambush site; and a larger armed combat robot watching the ambush site from the other side of the road with its weapons sighting sensors. The remote devices returned images from each viewpoint along with a myriad of other unnecessary data. Other than a fat fox, nothing travelled the road.

  The road below made a sharp turn from south to east and ran parallel to a stream. Voluminous evergreens lined the far bank of the stream in front of him, backed by jagged, white-capped mountain crests. The forest extended all around him, interrupted only by the mountains and the well-worn dirt road. One of the heavy trees lay across the road, preventing any vehicles from passing.

  The dry heat he had become accustomed to had slowly given way to a cooler, wetter climate during his journey west. In the cooling shadow of his foxhole, he considered reaching into the pod for a blanket or a heater. He figured he’d find one. Whoever prepped the damn storage bin had thought of everything.

  The genius behind the pod provided Hiram with all the tools he needed to escape with all the prisoners in the convoy. Access to dated maps and historical references provided a time and place to set the plan in motion. The never-ending supply of gear, including food, water, and clothing, would be necessary to support the needs of those he intended to rescue. He had yet to find any limitations on what the pod made available. Up to this point, he found the pod’s most valuable asset was the electric-drive, rigid-hull inflatable boat, or RHIB. He had used the boat to cross the sea from India to the Gulf of Aqaba. When the waterway ended, he had trekked across the Sinai Desert, travelling only at night. He avoided the extreme heat of the day by hiding inside a camouflaged cool flow blackout tent that converted the outside heat into a power source for a cooling unit. When he reached the Sinai coast, he climbed back into the RHIB and made his way to southern France.

  The approaching convoy consisted of three vehicles – a command car followed by two trucks. As usual, the French police sergeant in charge of this detail had settled his 300-pound frame in the command car’s spacious rear compartment. Three other policemen rode in the command car. A civilian drove each of the open-backed trucks, both hauling two policemen and eighteen exhausted female prisoners.

  The convoy had set out an hour earlier from a chateau high in the Pyrenees bound for Camp Joffre, the internment camp at Rivesaltes. The women, all Jewish, were forced to serve as maids at a weekend retreat for Vichy government officials in the spa town of Vernet-les-Bains. Weekday business lacked the volume to justify keeping, or feeding, the women. So, they made the seventy-kilometer journey to the chateau each Friday afternoon and returned to the camp on Monday.

  The women would return to J block which held all the other Jewish women and children well after the evening meal had been served. At the chateau, the meals provided to the women had been fresh, the bread still soft. And, unlike the near starvation rations at the camp, food had been plentiful. Sleep, on the other hand, had not. The women worked day and night.

  Hiram had observed the routine for more than three weeks with his drones. The number of prisoners, the strategic positioning of guards on each truck, and the route the convoy followed remained consistent. Despite his recon effort, he prepared contingency plans to support changes in the number and arrangement of vehicles, presence of additional guards, varying arrival and departure times, and weather conditions. He continued to track the convoy’s approach toward his ambush site.

  The command car rounded the bend below Hiram’s position and came to a skidding halt on the hard-packed dirt road to avoid hitting the large tree that Hiram had dropped across it. The two trucks that followed came to a more controlled stop behind the command car but were unable to preserve the desired distance between the vehicles, as Hiram anticipated.

  With one push of a button on his C2ID2, Hiram initiated four blasting caps. The first detonated a satchel charge buried under the stopped command car. The explosion blew the vehicle and its occupants apart, the remains of the vehicle chassis settling upside down in the stream. The next explosion dropped a large tree across the road behind the second truck, cutting off any attempted escape by the remaining vehicles. The final two explosions created large craters at natural choke points in the road, approximately two kilometers in each direction from the ambush site. The narrow road remained the only route to or from the chateau. Any response the Vichy forces might mount would only get by those choke points on foot.

  In less than a minute Hiram killed three of the remaining guards and one of the truck drivers with his sniper rifle. The remaining guard from the rear of the front truck and the driver of the second truck had taken refuge behind the lead truck, out of Hiram’s sight line. The guard rose up and fired a wild burst in Hiram’s general direction, causing him to duck. An anguished scream burst from one of the female prisoners in the lead truck. The prisoners in the second truck huddled with their heads down, some crying, some screaming.

  Hiram put down his sniper rifle and turned his attention to the C2ID2 screen controlling the combat robot on the other side of the road. He adjusted the robot’s position, then swiveled the gun platform a few inches, sighting on the two remaining men. At his command, the robot’s nine-millimeter machine gun barked a six-round burst and both men crumpled to the ground.

  “Stay in the trucks and
keep your heads down,” Hiram shouted twice, first in Hebrew, then in French, as he scrambled down the slope with his assault rifle in one hand and a nine-millimeter pistol in the other. Despite his French heritage, Hiram spoke only Hebrew and English. His great-grandfather Silas had abandoned all things French when he immigrated to Israel after the war because of France’s complicity in the Holocaust. During the trip from India, he’d learned and then practiced a few French phrases using the real-time translator everyone called the Babel Fish in honor of the great English writer Douglas Adams. Hiram thought Adams would’ve had a number of witty things to say about the present incarnation of his idea for a universal translator. Although accurate, the slow translations provided made the tool awkward in conversation and unacceptable in fast-paced situations like in the one Hiram now found himself. Whether or not the women understood his words, the maids complied with his direction.

  Hiram approached each downed policeman and shot him in the head. The women in the trucks screamed some more. Unable to find one man, Hiram presumed the body was entangled in the remains of the command car.

  Turning his attention to the women, he shouted “Danette Halphen, identify yourself!” in Hebrew, then French. That phrase almost exhausted his French and revealing the Babel Fish to these women promised to raise questions he didn’t want to answer.

  “You must help us,” one of the women in the first truck said. “Elsie’s been shot.”

  Hiram sprinted over to the first truck. He climbed into the cargo bed. One of the prisoners clutched her upper abdomen, blood oozed between her fingers. He didn’t expect her to survive long, even with his 21st Century medical supplies.

  After a quick examination, he turned to the women and said in Hebrew, “I can ease her suffering with a pain killer. She’s going to bleed out quickly. I’m sorry.” One of the maids passed along the message to the others. He pulled an auto-injector full of morphine from the medical kit on his belt and jabbed it into her thigh, then applied combat gauze to the wound, which did little to staunch the flowing blood. He said, “I’m sorry” once more. Someone touched his arm, and he turned.

  She pointed to herself and said, “Danette Halphen.”

  Hiram closed his eyes and opened them again. He had traveled here for the woman in the picture. Nothing prepared him for the shock of seeing his great-great-grandmother standing before him. Her young, rounded cheeks were accentuated by a beautiful, comforting smile so much like Rachel’s. He forced himself to focus on her, the adrenalin made it difficult.

  “Your cousin David in America sent me to rescue you.” Hiram had practiced the story a hundred times along the way, often employing the Babel Fish to test his rusty Hebrew. With Danette’s son Silas living with David and his wife Eliza in America – a wise decision made after the “Night of Broken Glass” that took place in late 1938 – Hiram thought the rescue scenario viable. Explaining time travel to a woman who had not yet heard of an atomic bomb, or the liftoff of a shuttle headed for the stars, seemed less believable.

  A woman repeated his story in French. A few others exchanged quiet words.

  “I’ll take you and anyone else who cares to come, but we need to leave now.”

  “You are here to save us?” one of the women said in well-practiced Hebrew.

  He hadn’t taken his eyes off the woman claiming to be Danette. “Yes, we need to go now.”

  The corner of Danette’s lips lifted and he saw his sister standing before him for an instant. He returned his attention to the group, reassured his great-great-grandmother was among them.

  “Please come with me if you want to live. I suggest we all get moving.”

  The women in the trucks hesitated, looking at each other for reassurance. After a moment, most climbed down and gathered a few meters away. A few of the women remained by the fallen woman’s side.

  “They won’t leave Elsie behind.” A woman approached him, her Hebrew distorted and uncomfortable, not native. “You save the families?”

  “If we stay here much longer, we won’t have a chance to save them,” Hiram said.

  The woman looked at him for a moment, as if his words made no sense. “You save the families?” A wisp of curly brown hair had escaped her green scarf and swept across her face as a welcome breeze slipped past.

  “I’ll do everything in my power to save them,” he said. As long as Danette stays safe.

  She nodded and headed toward the women by the truck. She spoke quietly to them and still they refused to come along. Hiram worried they might tell the French police what happened. About a stranger coming to the rescue. About a stranger with a tie to Danette Halphen. After a few minutes of argument, the woman with the green scarf returned to Hiram defeated. “They stay. We go now.”

  He looked back at the five women huddled in the truck with Elsie, all thin and terrified, then focused on those willing to leave. “You’ll translate for me?”

  “Oui. Yes,” she said.

  Hiram directed the thirty remaining women down into the stream. They whimpered as the cool mountain water encircled their bare legs. Around the bend and out of eyeshot from the road, six inflatable boats and one kayak waited for Hiram’s return. Each boat held up to six women, the kayak only two. Since six of the thirty-six women that travelled on the two trucks wouldn’t be coming along, they would use only five of the boats. Getting the women loaded into the boats from the waist deep water took a few minutes, but they all managed to get in. Once they settled in the boats, Hiram considered giving a lesson on the life vests stored in each boat. Time wasn’t on his side.

  “This will be easy,” he explained. “All you need to do is guide the boats downstream.” He used a paddle to demonstrate. “A half-kilometer from here the stream will cross under a bridge then diverge from the road, heading off into the wilderness to the north. About three kilometers from there you’ll see a spot where a large tree has fallen across the stream. If I haven’t caught up to you by then, wait for me in the still water behind the tree. Stay in the boats – do not get out on shore.”

  “Where are you going?” the woman in the green scarf said.

  “I have to clean up this site so we can’t be followed,” he replied. “I’ll be along as soon as I can.” He severed the ropes securing the inflatable boats in place with his combat knife and pushed the boats downstream. “Now get moving – you need to make it be past the bridge before anyone comes up the road from the east.”

  Hiram sent a recall signal to the ground recon robot and the larger combat robot, then took hold of the remaining boat and cut its anchor line before dragging it to shore. He collapsed the boat by removing its internal ribs and deflating the internal bladders. Hiram waded back into the river and retrieved the six boat anchors, carrying them two at a time to a large boulder near the far shore. He laid his backpack out on the rock, activated the portal within, and dropped the anchors into the pod. The collapsible boat and its paddles followed. He lowered in his sniper rifle, attaching the weapon to the mount on the wall nearest the opening. When the combat robot arrived, Hiram activated the robot’s portability mode and the device began to fold in on itself. The machine gun arm retracted and the six road wheels rotated and disappeared into the robot’s belly. He pushed the device through the portal as the recon robot arrived. Hiram scooped up the smaller device, along with his backpack. He slung the assault rifle over his shoulder and made his way back to the kayak still waiting in the waist deep water. Once the rifle, robot, and pack had been stored and sealed in the cargo hatches, Hiram climbed in himself, pulled up the anchor, stowed it in its storage compartment, and set off downstream.

  Three kilometers past the bridge, Hiram caught up to the five inflatable boats, all huddled close to the fallen tree partially blocking the stream. Several of the women held on to adjacent boats, keeping them from drifting farther downstream alone. As he floated toward the cluster, he stowed his paddle and pulled the C2ID2 auxiliary monitor from its storage pouch on the front of his combat vest. The view from
the aerial drone showed a swarm of French policemen filtering through the choke point coming from the chateau. The policemen carried small caliber weapons and no watercraft. Any immediate search for the missing women would be conducted on foot.

  “I hope you’ve had a chance to get used to the boats,” Hiram told them once he had paddled into their midst. “The water gets a little rougher from here. We’ll be moving deeper into the wilderness as we go, so we’ll be less visible.”

  He reached into the storage compartment of his kayak and pulled out a metallic bag, then held it up for the women to see. The bag held enough high-protein meal bars to satisfy at least ten of these women. The bars were labeled with English food names like beef wellington and grilled tuna, none of which matched the actual taste of the thing inside. Every food he pulled out of the portal tasted the same, smelled like animal feed. He assumed the pod caused the unsavory flavor. “This is food. You will find one of these bags in each of your boats. You open it like this.” He pinched the tab at the top of his package and pulled the seal away. “Eat. You’ll need your strength.”

  The woman in the green scarf translated for the other women, showing them how to open the bags just as he had.

  “Your name?” Hiram asked the woman.

  “Deborah Lowenstein,” she said.

  “You speak French?”

  “Most of us do. Much better than Hebrew. Except for Maria, she speaks better Spanish.”

  Hiram nodded, disappointed. He never learned a bit of Spanish.

  “What about English?” Deborah said in English.

  Hiram smiled. “Everyone speaks English too?”

  “No, but Sarah and I do.” She pointed to another of the women who held up her hand.

  “It will have to do.” He kept his eyes on Deborah. “You tell them what I say when they need to know.”